BLOG 2/24/2016. ON A PERSONAL NOTE: BLACKNALL MEMORIAL CHURCH

BLOG 2/24/2016. ON A PERSONAL NOTE: BLACKNALL MEMORIAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH’S CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION

As my Facebook friends discovered, I celebrated my 88th birthday last Sunday. That’s a long time to live. It is also is filled with fascinating memories, joyful and painful, and few are more graphic than the decade that I spent as pastor of the Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church in Durham, North Carolina in the 1960s. It reminds me of how many of the events that form our lives are those over which we have no control. That decade is on the front-burners of my mind this week because on this coming weekend Blacknall Church will celebrate its centennial.

When I arrived in Durham in the early summer of 1958 it was a move over which I had no control, and a move which I would never have chosen. It all turned out to be the most formative decade of my life, and also the decade of total transformation for the Blacknall congregation. For me it was totally cross-cultural. The textile industry was very prominent in the southern United States in those days, and the life of the textile workers was as close to chattel slavery as you could in the economic scene of that day. I knew almost nothing about it. I came from a professional family of engineers, educators, lawyers, scientists, etc. I went to an elite liberal arts college (Davidson) and had spent the previous four years in the denomination’s campus ministry at North Carolina State. The only thing I knew about textile industry communities was that there were a couple of scholarly sociological studies about how difficult they were (Mill-hands and Preachers, by Liston Pope, and Spindles and Spires by Donald W. Shriver).

Then in a series of events that were understandable but disruptive, and over which I had no control, God rather ‘backed me into’ accepting the pastorate of this mill village congregation in Durham. Durham itself, in those days was a dismal textile and tobacco town also inhabited by two universities (Duke and North Carolina Central) which universities had pretty much a life of their own apart from the city of Durham. The church was, likewise, a marginal congregation within the Presbyterian Church, and probably the last place any aspiring young pastor would ever want to find himself/herself. … But now I am only amazed at the providence of God which caused me to land there, though I was to experience some dark and lonely periods as God faithfully formed me, and also was forming the congregation. (Today, of course, Durham is at the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Textiles and tobacco have disappeared.) Blacknall has now had over a half-century of incredibly fruitful ministry to a totally new and different context under that gifted leadership of my successors.

Durham was, at that time (1958), a blue-collar town, and racist to the core. It ostensibly had the largest KKK klavern in the country. There was a pervasive low self-esteem in the city, and this was true of the church also. It was hardly a colony of vital faith—more like ‘religious Christianity’ (as described by Bonhoeffer) or just dull-grey religion, which was part of the social fabric of that marginal life. The decade of the 1960’s was also that period of turbulence what with the civil rights movement, the Viet Nam war, and the integration of schools.

Yet a significant part of my formation was the fact that the person who had used his influence to get the church to call me was a young brilliant and Christian instructor in chemistry at Duke who wanted a nearby church to which he could recommend students to go. Blacknall was two blocks from Duke’s east campus, and soon began to attract students (and faculty) who were drawn my my use of the pulpit for thoughtful Biblical exposition. But students also have a way of being relentless in their questioning, in articulating their unbelief and agnosticism. And that decade set me free to relish conversations even with the most hostile or confused. I have never been the same since. My successors in that pastorate have been awesome, and a joy for me.

I would never have chosen Blacknall or Durham, but God chose them for me, and I am going to herald his faithfulness this weekend at the centennial of Blacknall. (I will, therefore, not blog this coming Sunday).

If you want to know more, feel free to comment and ask questions. I would love it.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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